Best Buy’s impossible dream: That you’re an impulsive moron
Today’s item is stupid on not just one level, but two–a regular you- got- your- chocolate- in- my- peanut- butter- type mash-up of two wonderful ideas that go great together. And by “wonderful,” I mean “really, really stupid.”
I’m talking, of course, about Best Buy’s vending machine in the A concourse of the Las Vegas airport (see crappy photo, right).
Stupidity No. 1: Best Buy’s marketing geniuses (genii?) designed this thing to sell iPods and whatnot to people not only dopey enough to have left their music players on the plane they just got off of, but also moronic enough to decide, 100 yards later, that they should shell out for a new one, rather than walk back to the gate and retrieve their old one. To say nothing of the fact that if you’re not packing a laptop full of music and iTunes, a brand-new iPod in an airport is the functional equivalent of a five-pound bucket of lard–it may be a bit lighter and more easily fit in an overhead bin, but with a dead battery and no songs, it’s every bit as useful as rendered pig fat.
Stupidity No. 2: You can also use this machine to buy–wait for it–gift cards! As we all know, gift cards are contemptible on their face–a marketing plan driven by overt hope that you’re suggestible enough to want to restrict your money to one store, and the unspoken dream that you won’t use all the money that you or some other dope put on it. After all, every customer who leaves a dollar on the card before losing it in the back of the junk drawer is a potential patsy–and a profitable one at that.
But the real problem is worse: I mean, who the hell needs a Best Buy gift card at the Las Vegas airport? The nearest Best Buy is not only on the other side of a security checkpoint that takes 70 minutes to get through, but also a 15-mile cab ride away. I can think of a few places where a Best Buy gift card is less useful, but most of them are in sub-Saharan Africa. Go fish.
So, what have we created here? A machine aimed at the peanut-buttery center of your weak-kneed desire for an impulse purchase, enrobed in the chocolate-covered dissatisfaction of delayed gratification, since it’s thoughtfully placed where you can’t possibly use what it sells. Impressive.
For this, Best Buy earns the coveted double-whammy. To badly paraphrase Obi-Wan Kenobi, “The only thing sadder than the fool who put this thing in the airport is the fool who uses it.” Please, don’t be that fool.
Me? I remain unimpressed.